The present invention relates generally to the field of nanodevices, and more specifically, to diamond-shaped pillars in nanopillar arrays for controlled polymer stretching and in particular DNA stretching and effective translocation into nanochannels.
DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) encodes rich genetic information that is closely linked to human health and critical to diagnosing predisposition to diseases, such as cancers. Over the past decade, tremendous technological advancement in DNA sequencing has made possible the fast and inexpensive retrieval of such information and thus revolutionized scientific understanding of genomics and biomedicine. Despite these achievements, one technological limitation of incumbent sequencing technologies that remains unresolved is the short DNA read length (<1000 bases), which increases error rate because of extensive sample fragmentation, modification, and amplification. Recently, advanced micro- and nanofluidic systems, e.g., nanochannels and nanopores, have been developed for the sorting, sensing, and analysis of DNA and have the potential of reading single long DNA molecules without elaborate sample preparation, thus potentially providing high information density and high sequence fidelity at a lower cost.
The issue regarding success for these nanochannel/pore technologies is the ability to linearize and translocate DNA macromolecules through a nanoconfined fluidic environment, where the critical genetic information can be retrieved by optical mapping and/or electrical detection. However, translocating a long strand of DNA into an extremely narrow nanochannel/pore is recognized to be challenging, because the entropy loss resulting from the confinement and the need to stretch the DNA macromolecule create a free energy barrier, which reduces DNA capture rates and causes clogging at the nanochannel/pore entrance.